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Gas and Electricity Prices

This is a dress rehearsal for the day, not long off, when production drops because global resources are depleted. We need to have alternative sources of energy well-embedded long before then.
 
…and learn to use a lot less energy full stop. I’m sure most here didn’t grow up in houses where it was 20+ degrees in every room all year round.
 
Profit is a dirty word if you’re on a nice public sector pension. Essential for the rest of us though.

My pension is in a SIPP that I manage. I'm sure the same is true for many other members. I'm all for companies making a healthy profit so I don't have to spend my twilight years living off Tesco Value baked beans.

But when it comes to the current energy crisis I don't have a problem with taxation effectively subsidising people's bills - all that means is that the better healed sections of society who (hopefully!) pay more tax soften the blow for the people experiencing real hardship. To me that's just how taxation should work in a fair society.
 
Jim - I should express myself more clearly. I'm suggesting that it needs restructuring in a way that benefits the UK population rather then the efforts to date.

Regards

Richard

Fairy snuff. :) That would means a number of 'non structural' changes as well.

e.g. actually training and employing many more nurses and doctors to a good level of skill so they can also have decent conditions of employment and feel able to to do their work better with less stress. Also making the 'care' system a part of how the NHS works, and ensuring *that* had the people and resources to cope properly - ending 'bed blocking'

Abolishing all the "Trusts" and "Oursourcings" and the faked up requirements to run like a 'business'.
 
Of course you can, as long as you have water, a heat source such as a wood burner, and food that doesn't require refrigeration. It won't be much fun, but it is certainly possible.

Erm. I doubt expecting everyone who lived in Grenfell Tower to use a wood burner and to do without electricity would have been ideal. Ditto for all the homes in the UK that are now almost unsellable due to inflammable cladding!

And without electricity the lifts wouldn't work. Leaving people on the umpteenth floor to have to carry the wood up many flights of stairs. (Wood smoke is also toxic, so not welcome in cities.)

The reality is that many people don't live in a nice x-up/x-down detached house in suberbia, open country. And the trees we need for ecological reasons might soon go if we all used wood for heating.

The only place I've ever stayed was a wooden house in NE USA surrounded by its own woodland. There the main heat source was a woodburner and they cut their own wood from their own trees. Also made their own Maple syrup. Great place to live. But not exactly typical of where millions live in the UK.
 
This is a dress rehearsal for the day, not long off, when production drops because global resources are depleted. We need to have alternative sources of energy well-embedded long before then.
Global hydrocarbons will never be depleted as there is a huge amount stored over billions of years. Rather we'd kill ourselves first.

Ask yourself from where did all the oxygen in the air come? There was none or very little oxygen after the earth was formed by the collision of two large bodies where the vast heat generated melted all the rocks and other gubbins. The metals would have oxidised i.e burned in the oxygen and used up most if not all of it up. There was a lot of carbon dioxide though. The Earth still after 4.5 billion years has a molten metal core.

A billion years after the collision simple plant life arrived and the process of photosynthesis started to replace the carbon dioxide with oxygen. So if we assume that all our oxygen arrived this way there is a hell of a lot of carbon locked up as hydrocarbons. Today the atmosphere contains just 0.04% carbon dioxide and the rest must be locked up somewhere.

The answer to our energy problems and something I've been saying for decades is Hydrogen from sea water generated by electricity from the energy we get from our Sun. However there is one huge problem - mankinds attraction to war and conflict.

DV
 
My pension is in a SIPP that I manage. I'm sure the same is true for many other members. I'm all for companies making a healthy profit so I don't have to spend my twilight years living off Tesco Value baked beans.

But when it comes to the current energy crisis I don't have a problem with taxation effectively subsidising people's bills - all that means is that the better healed sections of society who (hopefully!) pay more tax soften the blow for the people experiencing real hardship. To me that's just how taxation should work in a fair society.

I agree, and those who do earn more pay more tax (forget the global super rich who can go where they choose for a minute, they’re largely irrelevant to making a material difference to overall tax revenues). The most vulnerable will need additional help and I think they’ll get it.
 
There was none or very little oxygen after the earth was formed by the collision of two large bodies where the vast heat generated melted all the rocks and other gubbins. The metals would have oxidised i.e burned in the oxygen and used up most if not all of it up. There was a lot of carbon dioxide though. The Earth still after 4.5 billion years has a molten metal core.

A billion years after the collision simple plant life arrived and the process of photosynthesis started to replace the carbon dioxide with oxygen. So if we assume that all our oxygen arrived this way there is a hell of a lot of carbon locked up as hydrocarbons. Today the atmosphere contains just 0.04% carbon dioxide and the rest must be locked up somewhere.

Hmmm, I think you are getting confused with the formation of the moon? The earth was formed by the accretion under gravity of gas and dust orbiting the newly formed sun and it was the moon that was then formed by a collision of another small planet / large asteroid that bounced off and settled into orbit.

Unless YouTube has been lying to me.
 
e.g. actually training and employing many more nurses and doctors to a good level of skill so they can also have decent conditions of employment and feel able to to do their work better with less stress. Also making the 'care' system a part of how the NHS works, and ensuring *that* had the people and resources to cope properly - ending 'bed blocking'

Alongside this though there also needs to be a means of making sure you extract a useful amount of return from qualified staff before they disappear to the likes of the USA for more monies............... but yes we need to get on with the necessary levels of training alongside adequate remuneration.

How we achieve this I honestly don't know as I don't feel confident that the current government is even fully minded to try.

Regards

Richard
 
The answer to our energy problems and something I've been saying for decades is Hydrogen from sea water generated by electricity from the energy we get from our Sun. However there is one huge problem - mankinds attraction to war and conflict.

DV

The Big Problem is vested interests and the way sectors like 'big fossil' have been deterimed to keep 'business as usual' going by funding misinformation and those who spout it or use it to set policies. They're still at it. Follow the money
 
Alongside this though there also needs to be a means of making sure you extract a useful amount of return from qualified staff before they disappear to the likes of the USA for more monies............... but yes we need to get on with the necessary levels of training alongside adequate remuneration.

Yes. A decent wage is a part of providing satisfactory working conditions. However the reality is that people - certainly in the UK - don't become a nurse to make themself wealthy. Sadly, their wish to help people is then abused and exploited via low wages and overly-demanding hours, conditions, etc. So no surprise when they go to an outsourcing company - and come back costing far more as that company creams off a profit.

Because UK Gov holds down the pay of NHS staff whilst allowing far more to be paid to 'outsourcing' chums of the politicians. This all make the NHS most costly as well as worse place to work, and means service is reduced and can't cope with any rise in need. As now shows up all too awfully clearly when people wait for *hours* for an ambulance, or for *years* for some appointments... meaning the problems are worse and also cost more to deal with.
 
The Great Oxygenation Event was caused by Cyanobacteria, not plants. And, man, did it cause a revolution!

Before the GOE, the Earth had a reducing atmosphere instead of an oxidizing one. Back then, if you bought a rusty car it would get shinier and less rusty as time progressed. Auto manufacturing and car dealerships were very different back then — well, they would have been but our species, let alone car salesman, hadn’t evolved yet.

Anyway, it was a crazy time. Life was only unicellular and often thinking to itself if only it could somehow work together to form multicellular life it could specialize with some cells being brain cells that think up stuff. But this was before that so cells had to imagine what multicellular life would be like.

Like I said, it was a crazy time and really you had to be there.

Joe
 
Hmmm, I think you are getting confused with the formation of the moon? The earth was formed by the accretion under gravity of gas and dust orbiting the newly formed sun and it was the moon that was then formed by a collision of another small planet / large asteroid that bounced off and settled into orbit.

Unless YouTube has been lying to me.
"The giant-impact hypothesis, sometimes called the Big Splash, or the Theia Impact, suggests that the Moon formed from the ejecta of a collision between the proto-Earth and a Mars-sized planet, approximately 4.5 billion years ago, in the Hadeon eon (about 20 to 100 million years after the Solar System coalesced

Analysis of lunar rocks, published in a 2016 report, suggests that the impact might have been a direct hit, causing a thorough mixing of both parent bodies.

The giant-impact hypothesis is currently the favored scientific hypothesis for the formation of the Moon


The energy of such a giant impact is predicted to have heated Earth to produce a global magma ocean, and evidence of the resultant planetary differentiation of the heavier material sinking into Earth's mantle has been documented."

DV
 
They are still impacted by global markets and French tax payers are subsidising the true energy costs. It’s no different to our govt paying directly into our energy accounts.

This is economic illiteracy. I'm start to see how the "good with the economy" tories have actually trashed both our economy and our society.

It's the difference between being given a belated, begrudged hand out to buy some bread and owning the actual bakery (and flour mill) (at a time when bread prices are sky-high). Night and day difference. *

Of course, if you own shares in the energy co. maybe you could argue "it's no different" at least for you, personally. The big difference is, one model benefits every household in the land, the whole economy and the other benefits a small minority of people at the expense of everyone else.


* For clarity; in this analogy the "bakery" is the energy company and the flour mill/wheat field is the oil & gas fields and/or nuclear power station.
 
The Great Oxygenation Event was caused by Cyanobacteria, not plants. And, man, did it cause a revolution!

Before the GOE, the Earth had a reducing atmosphere instead of an oxidizing one. Back then, if you bought a rusty car it would get shinier and less rusty as time progressed. Auto manufacturing and car dealerships were very different back then — well, they would have been but our species, let alone car salesman, hadn’t evolved yet.

Anyway, it was a crazy time. Life was only unicellular and often thinking to itself if only it could somehow work together to form multicellular life it could specialize with some cells being brain cells that think up stuff. But this was before that so cells had to imagine what multicellular life would be like.

Like I said, it was a crazy time and really you had to be there.

Joe

Don't profess to understanding this post, but I like it.

John
 
"The giant-impact hypothesis, sometimes called the Big Splash, or the Theia Impact, suggests that the Moon formed from the ejecta of a collision between the proto-Earth and a Mars-sized planet

Yes I know. But this is the formation of the moon not the earth.

the earth was formed by the collision of two large bodies where the vast heat generated melted all the rocks and other gubbins.
 
Matthew,

See post #2096.

Joe

Thank you Joe. I am pleased that my BSc. Astrophysics University of YT is still intact.

I have also been down a rabbit hole reading about the Great Oxygenation Event although I quibble about if you can call something that lasted a few billion years an "event" :)
 


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